The Pequot War, Mystic, Sixteen Thirty-Seven

In the predawn hours of May twenty-sixth, sixteen thirty-seven, English colonists from Connecticut and Massachusetts, allied with Narragansett and Mohegan warriors, surrounded the Pequot village on the Mystic River. What happened in the next hour would become one of the most consequential and contested events in New England history. The English commanders, John Mason and John Underhill, set fire to the village rather than engage in close combat.

Between four hundred and seven hundred Pequot men, women, and children were killed, most by fire, some by English swords as they attempted to flee, a few cut down by the Narragansett allies who had expected a traditional raid, not a massacre. The Narragansett called out, in what one English account preserved, that this was not their way of war. Within weeks, Pequot survivors were hunted through the swamps of southeastern Connecticut.

Many were sold into slavery in the West Indies. The Mystic attack and its aftermath effectively destroyed the Pequot nation as a political and military force. The surviving Pequot were legally forbidden from calling themselves Pequot for more than a century.

The causes were tangled: competition over the fur and wampum trade, the murder of a trader named John Stone in sixteen thirty-four, escalating English land demands, and the particular aggressiveness of the Puritan project in New England. No single thread explains it entirely. What is certain is the scale of the rupture.

Historians have called the Pequot War the moment when the balance of power in New England shifted permanently toward English colonists. The land on which you are now driving was remade by what happened on the Mystic River that May morning. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, federally recognized in nineteen eighty-three, has rebuilt a presence in southeastern Connecticut.

Their museum in Ledyard is considered one of the finest Indigenous history museums in the United States. The wound has not closed, but it has not been forgotten either.